Some embodiments described herein relate generally to methods and apparatus for measuring advertising effectiveness.
Over the past sixty years, television has been the dominant platform for brand advertising. Consumer purchase behavior studies have demonstrated that television creates immense value by increasing consumer awareness of and loyalty to brands and/or retailers. In doing so, television ultimately increases sales and gives marketers confidence that their investment has generated hard value.
In digital media, online impressions such as clickable advertisements can be tied to online purchases of specific products and/or through specific retailers with relatively little effort. Consequently, it has been easy to establish that internet advertising is effective for direct response and for targeting ‘almost ready to buy’ consumers, when consumers complete the majority of their transactions online. However, the large majority of American consumer purchases are still made in-store, and online sales represent a small portion of the US market. While internet advertising is pervasive, the ability to link internet advertisement exposure with offline purchase behavior in a meaningful way has remained elusive. Without a clear realization of the sales value that internet advertising can create, advertisers will continue to have difficulty justifying significant investment in digital media.
A need exists, therefore, for methods and apparatus for measuring advertising effectiveness.